1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an airbag restraining a passenger and an airbag apparatus including the airbag.
2. Description of the Related Art
One of on-vehicle airbags is a curtain airbag that inflates and deploys downward along the sides of a vehicle body to restrain a passenger laterally (see, e.g., JP, A, 2013-6539).
The curtain airbag according to the prior art has a plurality of tabs along its upper edge, the tabs having their respective slits into which brackets of the vehicle body are respectively inserted so that the whole curtain airbag is locked to the vehicle body. In the normal time, the curtain airbag is housed in a casing portion above a pillar or a side window of the vehicle body. When gas is supplied from an inflator, the curtain airbag appears in the interior of a vehicle and inflates and deploys downward along the pillar or the side window.
To reduce the capacity of the casing portion, however, the inflator is often positioned substantially parallel to the longitudinal direction of the vehicle. As a result, gas is injected into the airbag mainly at a slant angle in the vehicle longitudinal direction (details thereof will hereinafter be described in an embodiment). For this reason, the tabs near the connection point with the inflator in particular are largely subjected to a load component along the vehicle longitudinal direction due to reception of gas injected mainly at a slant angle, in addition to a downward load arising from inflation and deployment of the curtain airbag. In the prior art, therefore, a reinforcement fabric folded a predetermined number of times is joined to the tabs to enhance the durability, which however results in a complicated structure and an increased cost.